Anti-Afropolitan ethics and the performative politics of online scambaiting

ABSTRACT

Online scambaiting problematises the identity of the 419 scammer whose virtual labours connect significantly to the digital dimensions of Afropolitanism. When examined through the photographic practices demanded of 419 scammers in several Internet communities, scambaiting, a form of Internet vigilantism that is targeted at online scammers to avert scam, produces epistemic violence which evacuates the black male body of human dignity. Although scambaiting is potentially an ethical project, it embeds a system of oppression that generates Afropolitan masculinities, caricatured performances of the bodies of 419 scammers exhibited online as objects of shame. As a philosophical and aesthetic response to translocality and mobility, Afropolitanism stresses the cultural experiences and agency of ordinary Africans who assert a global sense of awareness. As both the Afropolitan subject and the 419 scammer are entangled in the assertion of agency, the globalism of both is shown to converge at the intersection of the digital. Building on Lisa Nakamura's essay on dogshaming, I argue that the sexual exploitation of black bodies on scambaiting websites gestures at technology's complicity in interpellating digital subjects and circulating social injustices. Unlike Nakamura, I foreground the performative aspects of scambaiting and connect these to Afropolitanism's intrinsic digitality.